Wow. The astounding grip the Saudis have on Western discourse.

Explosives pulverize historic sites in the Middle East, bulldozers erase ancient tombs and shrines, historic forts are torn down and Ottoman facades destroyed. The home of the favourite wife of the most revered man in an entire religion is even turned into a block of toilets. How can the world prevent this wicked desecration and extinction of a heritage that belongs to all mankind? I am, of course, referring to those iconoclastic Wahhabi-Salafist Muslim head-choppers … the Saudis!

And the world will do absolutely nothing. It will screech and rage and curse as the iconoclastic Wahhabi-Salafist Muslim head-choppers of Isis blow to bits the Roman ruins of Palmyra, but will never dare – and has never dreamed – of uttering a pussy-cat’s protest against Saudi Arabia’s willful destruction of the ancient graves, homes, shrines and buildings of Islam’s Prophet Mohamed and his closest relatives and companions. . . .

No, the real reason we ignore the vandalizing of so many Muslim sites is that we cannot – will not, must not – criticize the Saudis whose grotesque wealth silences all of us to such obscene lengths that [in the U.K.] our Prime Minister flies our flags at half mast when its autocratic ruler dies. No suggestion must be made – not even the softest whisper must be uttered – that might connect our Saudi friends with the apocalyptic cult called Isis, which follows with absolutist determination the Wahhabi Sunni faith adopted 270 years ago by the ancestors of the present Saudi monarchy.

One of the worst ideas Bernie Sanders has promoted is that these very same Saudis should intensify their miitary interventions and lead the way:

Instead of adopting Corbyn’s human rights perspective, Sanders has used Saudi Arabia’s massive military spending to argue that it should further dominate the region. Unexamined is how it got that way. Unexamined is the $60 billion arms deal between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that Obama signed off on in 2010. The BBC reports, Saudi “Prince Turki al-Faisal called for ‘a unified military force, a clear chain of command’ at a high level regional security conference in Riyadh, the Saudi capital.

In any case the Saudis now seem to be fully on board with the U.S. and Israel on achieving the goals of the so-called Oded Yinon plan:

And as Dan Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about the need to balkanize Israel’s northeastern neighbor in articles published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about "expediting the chaotic collapse" of Baathist Syria.

Then there is Wesley Clark's famous speech, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was "to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years".

Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the "Clean Break" document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to "shape its strategic environment".

Sam Husseini has a solid progressive reputation; I've seen his work before.

Jeff Tiedrich's "The Smirking Chimp" and "Information Clearinghouse" are two of the oldest left-opinion aggregators, both operating on a shoestring and dating way back to the beginning of the George W. Bush presidency.

No source can be taken completely on faith. It's important to follow links; your subconscious will, over time, draw connections, recognize patterns, and form a "gestalt" regarding authors and sites. There's no such thing as reliably "neutral"; Wikipedia tries hard, but its articles and policies are easily gamed by determined editing teams with unseen backing.

It's also important to keep in mind how ludicrous and unreliable the conventional standards of media respectability are.

To name a few examples: The two supposedly most "respected" U.S. newspapers, NYT and WaPo, have become notorious for excruciatingly bad journalism on certain subjects (e.g. the Middle East, particularly Israel-Palestine and the "global war on terror", or the operations of the MIC / the "deep state"). On foreign policy and war, CNN regularly twists as much as Fox. Total buffoons like Tom Friedman and David Brooks are the top-ranked "respectable" pundits. The BBC is easily bent to UK politicians' whims and its latest scandal even involves sexual abuse of children by well-placed "respectable" establishment figures.

seem to this know nothing outsider to be fine. All three are written by credible foreign policy experts. The sites are leftie/liberal but as everybody knows reality has a liberal bias or anyway it used to before they rearranged the political ideology meter. How you judge the content of what they are saying is up to you. I read a lot of articles from so called credible sources that I do not agree with as I have a definite opinion about the bloody US neocon global imperialist's and it war on terra. I guess it's up to your lying eyes to judge what you read. The internet is a cacophony of information, opinion and history but it really is up to the reader to judge.

As for Bernie and Saudi Arabia I heard it from the horses mouth when he spoke at LU. It was in the question and answer after his speech. He said the Saudis should be getting their hands dirty or some such thing. It was a jaw dropper. He really does seem to toe the hardliner Israeli line. Today The Hairball Donald came out against US interventionist 'foreign policy'. He then said he would talk to Bibi as Bibi was a good friend and knew what he was doing. lol. As far as pols go it really does no good to judge the veracity of whatever they say as they are all full of it. It's like going to a wreslin' match and trying to judge which fake wrestler is real.

There you go my 2 cents. Which is pretty worthless as I too have my own bias and opinion and judge any source through my own lens. I like gjohnsits sources as they seem to include a good selection of writers, stories and opinion. I also trust the whistleblower's, muckraker's, leaker's, writer's, scholars etc. that offer some truth telling that isn't propaganda the official twisty version of 'the world as we find it'. Good luck being able to sort and judge what is the truth and what is simply a false story line to keep you knowing nothing. Trust yourself you know enough to be able to judge any source. You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

perspective of "This is a Saudi beef, their goal, their scheme, their proxies, so let them fight the damn thing - it ain't no business of ours". It would be best, of course, if all in the midle east were to adopt respect for their neighbor nation states and governments, and to be liberal secular democracies too, for that matter, but given the likelihood of that, we should just fade out and let the locals do their thing.

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That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --